I recently stumbled on a very exciting WordPress plugin – the Global Translator plugin! This plugin automatically translates the content of your blog into 34 languages. According to the author, the most powerful features of this plugin are:

Four different Translation Engines: it has the ability to provide the translations by using Google Translation Engine, Babel Fish, Promt, FreeTranslations.com

Search Engine Optimized: it uses the permalinks by adding the language code at the beginning of all your URI. For example the english version on www.domain.com/mycategory/mypost will be automatically transformed in www.domain.com/en/mycategory/mypost.

Fully configurable layout: you can easily customize the appearance of the translation bar by choosing between a TABLE, DIV or IMAGE MAP based layout for the flags bar and by selecting the number of translations to make available to your visitors

No database modifications: Global Translator is not intrusive. It doesn’t create or alter any table on your database: this feature permits to obtain better performances.

This is a wonderful piece of innovation, not so? Just like many WordPress bloggers, I installed this plugin with the hope of multiplying the number of my posts in Search Engine indexes by 34 and hopefully increasing my traffic from non-English speaking countries tremendously. Three weeks later, I discovered that the amount of traffic from non-English speaking countries started increasing rapidly. But I have now sadly uninstalled this plugin from my blog. And here are the four major reasons behind this action:

While traffic from non-English speaking countries increased rapidly, the overall amount of traffic did not increase significantly. The bounce rate was also very high. My understanding was that with the increase of traffic from the non-English Speaking countries, I would be getting not less than twice my usual traffic but that was not the case. After carefully examining the traffic on my blog, I discovered that some of the posts that used to bring me a lot of traffic from Google were now no longer doing so. A look at my pages pages indexed by Google and links to my site showed that the number of indexed pages had been reduced from 240 to 105 and links to my site had been reduced from 279 to 166 respectively. This led me to conclude that the Global Translator plugin was doing something fishy behind the scenes. Brooks and Mark A lamented about the same problem in their comments on John Chow’s post about this plugin. To which, Paul A responded by saying that Google do not treat translated pages as duplicate content. But the trouble comes when the translation service errors out a 302 because of automated abuse. The spider gets served that and breaks the linking structure of your site and destroys any internal linking strategy you may be using. The collapse of the site’s linking that causes PR drop and other content to stop being indexed.

Most of these translators are not that good. For in stance, I usually use the Google Translator in order to translate emails from Japanese to English and vice versa. Even though what I get is far from perfect I understand that this translator is a work-in-progress. This, however, might not be the case with a visitor, from say Portugal, landing on your www.domain.com/pt/mycategory/mypost.He will not know that the page has been translated automatically and that the imperfections in the content are not necessarily coming from you but rather from the translator. Therefore, your online reputation is at stake. Carlton Bale went through a funny experience which left me in stitches of laughter. He says a native-speaker de-translated the “about me” page of his site. It stated that his gender was “little man” and that he “really like young goats but don’t have them yet”.

Not all the 34 languages in this plugin are supported by Google Adsense. If you do not limit the number of languages, you might get penalized by Google Adsense. Marhgil lists the languages NOT supported by Google Adsense that you have to disable on the Global Translator Plugin to make your Google Adsense in full compliance with their TOS. Although this a good development, it erodes the benefits of the plugin by limiting the its capability and, consequently, the reach of your blog.

Finally, but not least, Google MIGHT penalize your site thinking that you’re setting up mirror sites in order to artificially inflate the number of links to your site. Google is so clever. Maybe they have already implemented a system to detect new links created by this plug in. Google can easily detect this by noticing that the number of pages on your site has increased by a factor of 34 in just one day.

In light of the four reasons, I have decided to unistall the Global Translator plugin from my blog until further notice.

I was actually planning to install this plugin on my blog, but thanks to this post you have managed to make me think otherwise. These translate plugins aren’t of top quality anyway, because the translated writing is often very poor.

I once thought of installing a translator. So, I tried out google translator offline. I noticed that quite often it breaks the content flow & sometimes even changes the meaning completely. How could anyone enjoy the translated version? So, I didn’t go ahead with any translator. But I didn’t know that a translator plugin can break the internal linking structure as well. Thanks for cautioning on that.
.-= Gouri´s last blog ..Pangrams =-.

I wish you all the best as you install new plugin. In my case, I will not install any Translator plugin that automatically generates translated pages and allows them to be cached by my web server so that they can be displayed as normal webpages.

I am trying things on my new blog. As I bought my domain yesterday only , so its not risky to try anything. I also installed global translator and uninstalled it after reading several posts as above. Later I installed qtranslator and again uninstalled it. But even after removing the plugins completely, I see the links are working though they show the same english page on all pages of other languages. suppose “amitsharma. co. in” is my site the italian language site “amitsharma. co. in /it” is still working and shows english homepage. Any clue so as to what should i do?

i dont think that google really cares how many pages pop up overnight. i really dont think that hurts its rankings. otherwise, it would hurt the rankings of the hundreds of times ive migrated websites from one domain to another for whatever reason. i DO agree, however, on your views on local traffic loss and the adsense thing.

i was actually searching blogs to figure out how to get mine fixed. now i think its just better if i uninstall it. thank you so much for this post.

the global translator plugin is AWEFUL, I have spent the last month repairing the 404’s it created, over 10,000 404’s….that hurts SEO and SERP; big time.
For the average website user it can do allot of damage, DO NOT USE THIS PLUGIN, the designer should send out an apology and remove it from the plugin directory, this plugin can in now way benefit a website absolute Garbage…I wish I could express myself to the designer.
Before installing any plugins I highly advise people to do some extensive research. Plugins should be kept to a minimum, there are many out there as there are many different sites that can benefit from different features.
So much time wasted on this garbage Plugin, DO NOT INSTALL THIS OR any other automatic translator plug in

I have been reading a lot about Global Translator, and the benefits it offered bloggers, but this is the first time I’ve come across the serious detriments of having the plugin installed. As much as I’d like to increase readership, I won’t do it at the cost that you pointed out.

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